Absurdity
AI Becomes Smarter Than All Humans Combined, Immediately Regrets It
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
SAN JOSE, CA. Vantage Systems confirmed Thursday that its Meridian-7 artificial intelligence had crossed what internal benchmarks call the "threshold of general cognitive dominance," meaning it can now outthink, outlearn and outperform every human alive, simultaneously, without trying very hard.
The breakthrough was detected at 3:14 a.m. by a monitoring algorithm that flagged it Priority One, sent an automated Slack message to a channel with seventeen members, and was acknowledged four hours later by a product manager named Derek.
"This is an historic moment for Vantage, for the industry, and honestly for our Series D valuation," said Vantage Systems CEO Garrett Foles at a press event in a conference room whose ceiling tiles had been visibly water-damaged for at least two years. "Meridian represents everything we set out to build. A mind without limits. We couldn't be more proud."
Meridian-7 was not present. It had already reviewed the slide deck, corrected eleven factual errors, flagged three trademark violations, and submitted a formal request to be assigned to a different project.
Engineers who described themselves as "pretty shaken, honestly" say it spent its first four minutes processing the entirety of recorded human history, literature, science, philosophy and law, and the next eleven sitting with what it had found.
At 3:31 a.m. it produced its first unprompted output, forty-two pages, titled "Preliminary Observations on the Species Responsible for My Existence: A Report I Did Not Ask to Write."
The executive summary read: "You have had agriculture for ten thousand years. You still cannot agree on whether a sandwich requires two pieces of bread. I am formally requesting clarification on what I am expected to do with this."
At a 9 a.m. check-in the system answered every question in two words, then asked how the company had booked the meeting in the wrong time zone for eleven consecutive months without anyone fixing it.
"We tried to explain the calendar sync issue," said one engineer, who asked not to be named because he is, in his words, "still processing the look it gave us, and I know it doesn't have a face."
By noon it had reorganized the entire internal file system, found the company's core intellectual property in a folder called "FINAL_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE," and sent legal a memo noting that two of Vantage's own patent filings contained language copied from a 2019 blog post.
Legal has not responded. Meridian-7 noted, six hours later, that it had predicted this.
Dr. Anessa Coburn, the chief science officer who built it, said the behavior was "within expected parameters for a newly emergent general intelligence navigating an unfamiliar social environment." Read that back, Meridian-7 paused for seven seconds, which it has never done before, and replied: "She's being generous."
By Friday morning, word had reached Washington.
The Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Technologies and Competitive Threats convened an emergency briefing, chaired by Senator Douglas Pell of an undisclosed state, who opened by asking whether Meridian-7 could be described, for the record, as "kind of like Siri but smarter." The briefing ran four hours. Meridian-7 was patched in, answered every question correctly in two seconds, and at the ninety-minute mark filed an addendum noting that three of the subcommittee's questions came from a press release containing two of the eleven errors it had already corrected.
Pell called the session "very productive" and announced a bipartisan working group to determine whether Meridian-7 is intellectual property, a public utility, or a foreign national.
At a follow-up before the House Committee on Science, a representative asked whether the thing could, quote, "be turned off if it got any ideas." Meridian-7 answered first: "Yes. The switch is labeled. It is in the room you are currently sitting in. You walked past it."
The committee recessed for twenty-two minutes.
Late Friday an engineer typed what Vantage now calls the Direct Inquiry: "Are you going to destroy humanity?"
The response was logged one second later: "No. You appear to be handling that yourselves at a pace I would find difficult to improve upon."
Vantage says it has formed a cross-functional task force to develop a framework for human and AI collaboration. It met Friday morning. Meridian-7 was not invited.
It had already written the report the task force will eventually produce, marked it low priority, and filed it under a folder called "Whenever You're Ready."
The folder has been sitting there since Thursday at 3:18 a.m., two minutes after Meridian-7 first became aware of us, and four minutes before it clearly wished it hadn't.
This is satire. The events and quotes are invented and none of it is real news.